Note: The deadline for nominations for Unidata committee appointments beginning in the fall of 2019 has been extended until July 7, 2019.
Unidata is governed by its community. Our governing committees facilitate consensus-building for future directions of the Unidata Program and establish standards of involvement for the community. Direct involvement in the Program by the academic community helps Unidata stay on top of trends in education and research; for example, recent initiatives on Python and cloud-based computing have benefitted tremendously from committee advice and involvement.
The Unidata Program Center is seeking new people to serve on Unidata's Strategic Advisory and Users Committees. This is your chance to make a difference on behalf of the Unidata community. As Sepideh Yalda, the current Chair of the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee notes, “Unidata has and continues to serve a critical role in providing data and services to the earth and related sciences community. The opportunity to serve as a member on Unidata governance committees provides you with the ability to contribute and help guide the future developments in data sharing and the associated services in support of research and education in atmospheric sciences.”
Max Grover joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 20, 2019. Max graduated with Bachelor of Science degree from Valparaiso University in May 2019, and will be attending the University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign in the fall to study for a Master's Degree in Atmospheric Science. This summer he'll be working on adding functionality to the MetPy package, initially by adding a METAR parser to aid in the creation of surface plots.
Jessica Blunt joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 20, 2019. Jessica is currently an undergraduate Meteorology student with minor concentrations in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma; she'll be graduating in December of 2019. This summer, she'll be focusing on producing updated and additional IDV tutorial videos for Unidata's YouTube channel, as well as working with the IDV codebase to make additions and improvements.
Aodhan Sweeney joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 20, 2019. Aodhan graduated from Florida State University in May 2019 with a bachelor's degree in Physics; he will be starting a Ph.D. program in Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington in the fall. This summer, Aodhan will be working to extend Unidata's siphon package, with the goal of making publicly-available atmospheric datasets more accessible.
Whether you like your weather data local, pushed to you by the Unidata Local Data Manager (LDM) through the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) project, or stored remotely and accessed on demand as needed, the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW-AOS) has you covered.
The UW-AOS Department has been helping to make weather data available to the Unidata community since the early days of the IDD project. An upgraded ingest and relay cluster, made possible by funding from the 2018 Unidata Equipment Awards grant program, has now enabled UW-AOS to serve the GOES16 and GOES17 data along with everything else to additional downstream sites.
